


Tide

by lejf



Series: the beach and the– [1]
Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Dragons, M/M, Pirates, Soulmate AU, Space Pirates, War, a bit tragic maybe?, you name it man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-02
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-09-03 17:35:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8722909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lejf/pseuds/lejf
Summary: A glimpse of Jared and Jensen over the span of worlds.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brokenhighways](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokenhighways/gifts).



> Hi, ok, so: This isn't a required read and isn't the main part of the gift. It's just a "little" prologue.
> 
> While they were both written for the purpose of this exchange, the first story doesn’t fit well with the overall tone of the second, so they've been separated. If you’re taking a gander at it nonetheless, there’s a super brief torture scene in the cut after captain!Jensen that you might wanna watch out for.

_Do you know how the world was born? It rose out from the sea of nothing, gravity dripping from the sides, sliding down the curves, and its pale-edged reflection stared back, disturbed._

_When it was emerged and done it hung like a moon, reflection only a distant concern. But on the cliffs, in the crevices, in the wires of the earth and the turf where the shattered sky crashed into the surf_ **_still_ ** _ran droplets and drips of the other side. (We like to call those, the whole, — who’ve got their insides in and outsides out and broken sides to sides when they can look through the mirror to see a different pair of eyes — ‘soulmates’.)_

* * *

Alarms blare like claxons; Jared’s fingers scrabble for the wall but slip through blood. His boots slide in spilt puddles as he splashes down the hall and it splatters up his suit. It’s all coming in from under one of the docking bay doors, oozing out in a horrifying flow. Every man in that bay is dead. Half the battalion gone. He’d heard them screaming over the comms before it all went silent.

His head bleeds something fierce. _Jensen, Jensen, please let him be alive._ He has too many worries fighting to be heard all at once: Jensen might be dead. The comm lines are down. The battalion has been massacred. The enemy is on board. This part of the ship might no longer be secure. He’s taken a hit to the head and might pass out any moment now. And above all, the alarms sound but there is no one else to hear.

He leaves the hallway of blood behind but it means his boots track a steady trail of red, staining the ship’s steel floors as he goes, all alone. Easy trail to follow. He’d been lucky, manning one of the side missile bays, watching as his companions had been rerouted to other parts of the ship that’d started to fail. None of them came back. But every man on this ship, trainee or commander or fresh-faced boy picked out of a crowd, knows the final failsafe. Jared just has to get there before he dies, too.

His hands shake as he stares into the retina scanner and the doors to the commanding deck slide open and shut after him. Half the deck is a huge transparent wall. Outside, no enemy ships can be seen flying against the blackness of space. Their second-in-command, the _Fauchard,_ hangs limply like a dead whale, all engines down, lights out, black ships clinging to its sides like leeches where the enemy boarded and destroyed.

They lost contact with the _Fauchard_ before their own alarms started sounding, but not before they heard the other captain screaming over the comms.

The dead vessels of their smaller fleets drift like debris. The home planet of their enemy looms in the distance, a sinister watcher, scorched with an atmosphere of deep red iron. They’d gotten so close.

The deck is silent except for the sounds of a single keyboard. The huge tiers of stations and computers — all vacant, save one. Jared is almost too afraid to look if it isn’t—

“Jared!” a familiar voice shouts. Relief floods into Jared’s sunken cavity of a chest. _Jensen._ He stumbles forwards into the arms of his lover, feeling everything in him uncoil and relax. Everything will be fine, even in the heart of the enemy’s territory, all his shipmates and army dead, alone in a dying ship.

“Jensen,” he breathes back, reverently, into Jensen’s shoulder, feeling their hearts beat in tandem. “It’s gonna be alright, Jen, we’re gonna be fine, it’s all—”

“I was waiting for you,” Jensen says, his hands fisting tighter into Jared’s suit. “I knew you couldn’t’ve been dead— They left me here, they went to fight, and it’s just me now, and you. I was waitin’, and I just couldn’t wait anymore.” He’s shaking with the effort not to cry, Jared realises, and he draws back to take Jensen’s face in his hands and wipe away every tear that’s threatening to burst. The screens around them show cameras from in the ships. His heart breaks when he realises Jensen must’ve witnessed every massacre on board.

Something huge slams into the commanding deck’s door, distending the steel. The metal groans. It won’t hold for long.

“It’s just us,” Jared repeats, eyes drawn to the way Jensen’s eyelashes sweep over his cheekbones, the way his eyes shine brightly even in this final hour.

He clutches onto Jensen, and as they fall back, lost in each other, Jensen reaches his arm out to hit a button flashing on his screen.

They close their eyes and hold on as the explosion rips through the ship, through the debris of their broken army, through the carcass of the _Fauchard,_ through the planet of their enemy, and lights up the cosmos for a split-second in the whole of history.

* * *

“Would you look at that!” Jared peers up at the noon sky, where a distant star suddenly flares bright like a surging fire, eclipsing the moon. The rest of his class cranes their heads towards the window. “We’re witnessing something unprecedented: perhaps a supernova, or the birth of a close planetary nebula.” The entire sky grows bright for just a split-second before it fades. “Depending on how distant we are from this star, the actual event must’ve occurred centuries ago,” he says, to his class. “As fast as light may be, space is substantially larger.”

His students bombard him with questions about the distant explosion. He doesn’t have many concrete answers for them, because, honestly, most astronomers around the globe are likely beside themselves right now trying to scramble over the phenomenon. By the time he finishes up the lecture and writes up questions on the chalkboard for them to ponder, his mind is utterly wrung out. He discusses the topic with other professors in his field in his university — a prestigious, top-tier tertiary institution — and sends a few letters to the ones he’s familiar with, overseas.

“My colleagues tell me that the brightness of the actual star is dimmer, discounting the wave of light, — one notch on the logarithmic scale — than the occurance we witnessed in 1081 and hesitated to call a supernova. That’s a _tenfold._ It falls out of our specified range. This is a different sort of phenomenon entirely. Perhaps there is another category of star we have yet to consider.” Alexander, another professor, gestures as they venture down the hallways together. They pass by one of the windows, and Jared can still see it: a bright temporary star in the sky. “I’m well aware that this was a monumental occurrence, but we must consider that none of our telescopes glimpsed a supergiant nearing its unstable stage in this branch of the galaxy.”

“It’s something else altogether,” Jared agrees as they turn a corner. Most of the student body has left the campus already and there is only one lone cleaner with his head down sweeping the floors. “I doubt we’ll find evidence of the heavier elements, even.”

“You can’t talk about that, it’s much too far to sample.” Alexander shakes his head in disbelief. “Would the world do to look at us! Foolishly stumbling around in the dark, with no eyes nor ears nor fingers in the galaxy to do our reachings, and by the time we do, the opportunity will have been long gone. I fear that this will remain forever a conundrum.”

The cleaner looks up as they pass by, and just like that, Jared’s world slows down. Time itself pauses to catch a glimpse of the most beautiful face he has ever seen. He can feel a chord in him singing, stretching like a string between them, threading him closer until he feels so strongly the urge to fall to his knees because not even that star in the sky shines as brightly as this one he sees.

“Jared?” Alexander’s voice thrusts him back into reality; the cleaner lowers his head, and Jared is left blinking, stunned, as the man moves away.

“Y–Yes,” he says, still glancing back over his shoulder. He dares not ask for his name. Professors do not mingle with the lower staff, and asking would be all too blatant, for the moment. He’ll question someone about it another date and pretend he’s looking for a cleaner that displeased him. “It’s– It’s, ah, something I believe we must leave to further speculations once we get our hands on any quantitative data at all. Say— to take our minds to the country’s current state of affairs, have you heard of what the Southern Crown proposes?”

“Of course I have!” Alexander scoffs. “It’s utterly preposterous! To bring those beasts into their fold? Their King must be mad! Savages!”

“They may be necessary for wars,” Jared says, diplomatically.

“Only as they are otherwise filled to the brim with illiterate fools and barbarians! How could our King possibly consider doing the same? Do _we_ appear to be in the stone ages, mingling with feral creatures in our capital? No,” Alexander grumbles under his breath. “They have no place within our society. Much of the populace takes my stance also. The decree will never be passed.”

“Hmm,” Jared hums, and does not comment further.

The next day, he lugs his books and notes into his lecture hall, still wary of the green eyes he’d felt lingering in his dreams. As usual, the equations on the board are done, and a few of his over-zealous students have already taken their seats. He greets them all by name. (He takes great care in knowing his students). “Now, who has answered the questions today?”

Lloyd, in the front row, casually rattles off the explanation. Jared praises him, though he has some suspicions about the authenticity of the statement, because the handwriting on the board is always the same and Lloyd’s own is particularly illegible. It’s not something he concerns himself about, however — it’s their own necks on the line — and the rest of the day he wrings himself dry attempting to fend off questions about the phenomenon of the star in the sky.

By the end, the students have all left, he’s taken three lectures, and he’s trying to scribble down theory for the latest phenomenon. _Fast radio burst,_ he writes. Then he has to take a break to answer letters where overseas skeptics are attempting to poke holes in the theory he published two years ago and threw the world of physics into uproar.

So what does he do? He tries to answer as amicably as he can and his elbow slumps further and further across the table until the quill tumbles out of his hands and he falls _asleep,_ buried behind and amongst his books _._

He jolts awake to the sound of chalk against the board, disorientated with the redness of the room, the sun having fallen, and the low call of birds outside. He wonders what the time is; he ought to get home. His dog is waiting for him. When he looks up, the sight that greets him is an unfathomable one: the cleaner that had so haunted his thoughts stands at the board, scrawling the proof in a familiar hand. Jared dares not breathe, afraid that the man will startle away and escape.

It is undoubtable that the one consistently answering the problem sets he prescribes is _this_ man. “How could someone with a mind like yours merely be sweeping floors?” Jared asks aloud, his voice breaking the silence.

The chalk hits the floor of the lecture hall and shatters. Scatters, in white dust. Jared will need to steal a new one from hall next door, but that thought’s a world away. “I– Professor! I didn’t see you there— I’m so sorry– I just thought– I thought–”

“I have no quarrel with you,” Jared says amicably, rising. The cleaner is gripping his broom with his knuckles going steadily white as if to fend Jared off with it. His eyes are wide and frightened. Jared wishes, mournfully, that that were not so. “It was merely inquisitive. At least, now, I know that my students have been unfaithful liars all year!”

He means it as a joke, but the cleaner shies from him further, reaching for his trolley in preparation to wheel it away. “My apologies, professor. I shall not bother you again,” he says in a rush.

“No, please wait!” The man stops at his call, and Jared hurries towards him. “I would like to learn your name. If you would so wish, I could allow you space to attend my lectures.”

“I’m much too old for that,” the man says, without turning. Jared shakes his head.

“With no tuition at all and able to comprehend the questions I set? You are a gem in the dirt and dust, my friend.”

When the cleaner turns around to fix Jared with his green-eyed gaze, Jared is struck, unerringly, by the notion that there is something strikingly familiar about his face, something just out of reach.

“You would just dig me out of the records even if I did not say, wouldn’t you?” he sighs, seemingly resigned. “Jen–”

Jared _knows,_ suddenly, the end of the name.

“–sen. Jensen Ackles,” he says.

“I am Jared Padalecki,” Jared says. “Although you were probably already aware of that.” Jensen’s face spreads into a hesitant smile, and again Jared is sure that he has seen that smile before.

“Yes,” Jensen says. “I was.”

Seized by the familiarity, Jared asks, “Have I met you before, Jensen? Were you, perhaps, a student of my primary? Secondary school?”

“I’ve never been to school,” Jensen says, which should be impossible, and makes Jared’s chest ache in so many ways. “I wouldn’t have met you before.” He smiles, tightly, and jokes, “Perhaps in another world. Isn’t that what physicists such as you concern yourselves so terribly over?”

“Yes,” Jared says. “But typically such worlds are decoherent! That’s a very obscure theory for you to recognise.”

Jensen says, “I’ve heard your lectures in the open halls, Professor, and if anybody _could_ reach through the fabric of the worlds to form a link, hold a heart, and allow a conscious to perceive both being and un-being, I think that’d be you, Professor.”

* * *

The Queen’s procession passes through their city today, and when Jared looks out of his rickety window of his rickety home on the outskirts, he can see their black and gold-pressed uniforms as her bearers march through. Peasant girls are lined up on the cobble-stoned streets of their homes, craning over each others shoulders to get a better glimpse of the golden-veined egg.

Jared, well, he doesn’t exactly rush down the stairs, call to his mother that he’s going to the Inner City to watch the procession, and burst out the door to see the _egg._ It’s more about the man that leads the procession, his hair combed back and lapels ironed to perfection. _Jensen Ackles._ Captain of the guard. Rider of the King. Legendary hero and more. Has a smile that makes Jared’s heart buckle.

He follows the procession, jostled around midst the peasant girls and their gossiping mothers as they approach the Inner City. He lives in the slums, so the high towers and walls of the Inner City seem foreign to him. The roads are paved not with stones, but with black asphalt, and horse-carts are a regular trundling sight. An enormous cathedral rises in the distance, and some of the buildings rise to — good lord — five stories, if not more.

The procession stops in the city square, overshadowed by an enormous fountain of a dragon taking flight, followed by girls from all over the city. Some are, like Jared, dressed in poor rags, while others are practically swathed in opulence and ornate dresses, _which is really quite impractical_ , Jared thinks as he is jostled around by the hundreds in the crowd.

Jensen Ackles — Jensen Ackles! — stands at the head of the bearers, ordering the girls into some semblance of a line. Of course Jensen would be here. He’d want to witness the choosing of his wife, wouldn’t he? The man himself stands proud and tall, badges shining on his lapels, exuding a sense of absolute control and confidence. Jared wants to melt at the sight of him.

He’s kind of pathetic, okay? The most he can do about the man of his dreams is hide somewhere in the crowd and watch from afar. The line starts to move, each girl brushing a hand against the Queen’s egg and turning away, crestfallen, when she fails to stir. Jared still remembers the day Jensen had been chosen — the city boy had looked so startled as the King’s egg flared gold under his hands, but ever since then, he’d accepted the mantle gratefully and with grace, his dragon, Glaive, flying at his side.

Jared _may_ have had a crush on Jensen all the way back then, too. Sue him.

Jensen watches the girls go, the crowd seeming endless, with a tightening line between his eyes. Jared worries for him, even though he guesses he doesn’t really have the right to. What if the Queen won’t choose anyone here at all? What if she’s never found because the girl who was fated for the egg had already died? As much as Jared hates the fact that Jensen’s destined to be with someone else, he’d never wish an eternity of loneliness on anybody _._ He watches as a girl wearing the most elaborate white dress he has ever seen bursts into tears after the egg remains still. No one is finding joy out of the Queen’s Rider’s prolonged absence.

But just like that, a siren breaks out across the city. Loud, wailing, in a high drawn-out scream. Something about the noise— _something,_ reminds him of panic, blood, and most of all, _Jensen._ Green eyes, steady hands. It sends a rattling chill down his spine.

The crowd bursts into panic and flies apart at the seams. Girls are screaming, fleeing, trying to get indoors or anywhere away from the sudden threat. The Queen’s bearers huddle inwards around the egg and begin to move. Jensen, though, Jensen looks skywards and a sudden shadow falls over the city square as his dragon blots out the sun.

People push and shove Jared and he has no idea what is going on, is the city under attack? What is happening? Before he knows it, someone barrels into him and he’s on the ground, and through the sea of running legs he can see a figure moving towards the bearers, knife in hand. Before the armed man can reach them, though, Jensen appears like a mirage, skewering the man with a well-placed sword thrust and a spray of blood.

There are more emerging from the fleeing crowd, men and women with knives in their hands, advancing on the Queen’s bearers, and Jensen and several members of the guard tighten up around the egg, drawing their weapons.

And Jared is on the floor. Stunned. No one has an eye for him, he’s just some stupid kid, and the citizens are still fleeing. Jensen’s dragon wheels overhead, piercing the sky with an enraged roar, but he won’t land and he won’t breathe fire yet, because it would cook the bearers and the innocents alive, too.

“Help! Please, help!” A woman is dragged by one of the– the _attackers,_ a knife at her throat. “Please!”

“Hand over the egg!” the man with the blade at her neck yells at Jensen. “Hand it over and she doesn’t get hurt!”

Jensen’s grip tightens on his sword and he lunges forwards — but not quickly enough. Suddenly everything dissolves into flashing blades and shouts and blood-sprays and Jared stumbles to his feet. He’s no use here, he can hardly fight for his life, but there’s no way on earth he’s going to _run._ He doesn’t understand what’s happening: Jensen and the rest of the guard are some of the greatest fighters in the realm. Have been, ever since the Crown accepted dragons hundreds of years ago. But somehow, these armed men are drawing blood and one of the guards hit the ground, crying out in pain.

Glaive swoops down and catches an attacker with his mighty talons, piercing straight through as he splits their ears with a shriek.

Jared sees, in terrifying slow-motion, one of the egg-bearers’ arms tear off with a _crunch_ of bone. Her attacker flings the limb aside and the world shatters into chaos once more as time rushes forwards in a flood. His feet are moving all of their own volition and he’s throwing himself at the bare-handed attacker but it’s like running into a stone wall; the man doesn’t even budge on his feet, just grabs Jared and hurls him into the remaining few egg-bearers. Sirens are shrieking in his ears. Shocked faces tumble past, the sky rolls over and over, then there’s a fleshy crunch and he’s again on the stone floor and the bearers have scattered around him. The egg is right by his head. He hears someone scream.

Everything under the sun is coated in blood and bodies. Jensen, though, Jensen is still fighting, his teeth gritted against the pain. People are stabbing the bearers around Jared, reaching for the egg, Jared has to help, Jared has to get the egg away, he has to get to his feet and run, (he staggers to his feet, fingers clutching his burden tightly) the bearers are dead, he has to help his people– But the egg is glowing. It’s radiating silver and warming under his hands. The light seems to cut through the haze of the battle; all eyes turn to him. He stands in a circle of bodies. A thousand things shriek in his mind. The egg has chosen him. That can’t be right. His people are dying. He’s not going to survive. Jensen is going to die. Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. His feet won’t move. He’s locked in place no matter how he struggles.

These attackers can’t possibly be human–

The blade slides right between his shoulderblades, between his ribs, through a lung, and out the other end. He can see it protruding out of him. It even grazes the surface of the glowing egg. It’s red with blood, his blood, and suddenly everything explodes in pain and he can’t breathe and his legs give way.

“Jared!” Jensen _screams,_ raw and broken, like he had to rip apart something inside of him to get the cry out of his throat, but Jared can no longer hear him. The blade withdraws with a slurping sound and seems to draw his insides with it. It plunges back in and even though Jared’s lungs have collapsed, he screams— just as the stone under their feet shatters because Glaive slams into the ground, unhinges his jaw, and engulfs the whole of the city square in blinding blue-white flames.

Jaren wonders, distantly, before the heat reaches him, in the space between the blackness, the distance between the stars, how Jensen could possibly have known who he was.

But then the space closes and there is no distance left at all.

The dragon does not stop there. His blood boils. He roars for a day and a night until his throat is bloody and all the buildings have melted under his fury. The cathedrals fall. The buildings collapse and drag themselves down the slopes.

The sirens have died out across the city and all the concrete is molten now, lava, an enormous field of it, and the only body left is that of the unhatched Queen who will never hatch again. Jensen’s dragon — Jensen’s no longer, (Jensen is _dead,_ incinerated in the inferno of his own despair) — takes for sky. For twenty days and twenty nights, all around the world dragons raze their cities to the ground, destroy, curse the savagery of humans, and flock to the skies, with or without their riders, crying out as though their hearts have shattered.

Never once do they return.

Just like that, an age ends.

* * *

Jared escapes from foster care at the age of twelve, gets caught, and subsequently flees once every year. He gets sold off to this snotty family at sixteen as some kind of servant, but he keeps trying. It’s practically obligatory at this rate.

This time, though, he thinks he might actually get away. It only took eight tries, what do you know! His legs are tucked tightly against his chest, breath cramped, but he feels his heart leap as the box around him starts to rock. The ship is actually undocking, blessed Queen, he’s actually gonna go. The ship’s bound for what they call the fourth part of the world. The New World. He’s going to get there, no one’s going to know that he’s just a useless parentless boy, and he’s going to start a new life.

Everything is great. He climbs out of the box every now and then to take a little nibble from the storages and stretch his muscles, wipe himself dry on the walls of the boat, but otherwise he keeps hidden and out of sight. Well, he creeps up at night to take a piss overboard, too. It’s all going fantastically until one day the boat shudders and he hears shouting above deck and it’s not just the captain’s usual angry sort of shout, it’s the alarmed type. A musket goes off, excruciatingly loud, and Jared’s heart leaps into his throat. Either there’s some serious mutiny, which he doubts, or pirates are boarding. He huddles down further into his box as if it’s going protect him. He hears a cannon fire, then the whole _boat_ rocks again. Musket shots sound again, again, and again. There’s unfamiliar shouting.

By the time it all falls silent, he feels like he’s never going to breathe again, and he’s honestly got no idea who won the skirmish up top. He doesn’t think he’ll like it either way. There’s the sound of thick boots clambering down the stairs into the hold and suddenly boxes are being thrown open. They must be pirates. Shit. Looting. What’s he supposed to do? Run away? Run away _where?!_ He’s on a _boat._ Fight all these pirates single-handedly?

There’s muffled laughter. He gonna die. Jared resigns himself to a short fate.

His stomach is writhing like a leaden snake when the lid to his box is thrown aside and light floods in. A terrifyingly ugly face matted with hair stares back at him, shocked, and so Jared does what a reasonable person would do. He screams. Of course.

More boots on the stairs. He’d rather be with many pirates than one. There’s a higher chance of one taking his way with you than a whole crew passing you around. Jared keeps screaming, and the pirate snaps out of his shock because, hey, he just opened a box and there was a teenager inside, and hauls Jared out by the scruff. Jared immediately snaps his jaw shut. Doesn’t want to get punched.

“Look who found a rat in the storage.” The pirate shakes him a little, and Jared dares raise his eyes. The pirate crew does not look even vaguely friendly. They’re a group of men — and, to his surprise, one or two women — with untrimmed beards here and there and steely eyes. “What do’ya say we do with this one, eh?”

“I say we toss him over,” one of the women says, crossing her muscled arms across her chest. “Though maybe...” She turns her head to the stairs. “Jensen! Oy, Cap’n!”

Jared’s head comes up in an instant. Jensen. _Jensen._ Where has he heard that name before? He most certainly has, though he’s got no idea from where. Maybe a fable about a notorious pirate?

Then the pirate captain appears from the topside, light shining around him, and if Jared wasn’t already on his knees, he would’ve been. His breath catches in his throat. Jared has never seen anyone more beautiful in his entire _life_. At least he gets to die having seen perfection. Fuck. Ballades should be written about this man. Jared quickly drops his eyes, though, as if he doesn’t deserve to look upon their captain.

A pair of well-shined boots comes into view, and before he knows it, a warm and surprisingly gentle hand tips his head upwards. His eyes dart around frantically, because good bloody Queen, that man is impossibly beautiful, what the fuck. He’s aware of a steady green gaze flaying him apart, unstringing him.

“Jared?” the man asks lowly. The voice rattles down Jared’s spine. Jared nods, swallowing thickly. How does the pirate captain know who he is?

The hand disappears. When Jared looks up, all he sees is Jensen’s retreating back. The rest of the pirates are shooting him curious looks. “Come,” the captain calls as he walks. Jared nearly trips over his feet to obey. “Any of you touch him, you’re dead. He’s mine.”

He’s led onto the pirate’s vessel and into the captain’s quarters themselves, where Jensen leaves him with a curt order to sleep. Jared really can’t help poking around the desk strewn with papers, though, but as he peers at stray ink-smeared quills, the truth of the matter is that he doesn’t know how to read. He does, however, recognise a few of the seals on the envelopes. Pirates collaborating with some of the wealthiest families under the Queen? How odd.

Mostly unwittingly, he actually does doze off after a while; the captain’s bed is just too soft and luxurious to resist after weeks of sleeping in a wooden box. When he blearily opens his eyes again because he hears the cabin door creak, a draft following on Jensen’s heels, the room is dark. Night’s crept up on him as he slept. He watches the indistinct figure of Jensen light a candle on the desk before settling down to write.

Jared should feel scared, perhaps. He’s at the mercy of pirates, but strangely enough, he can’t seem to summon up enough of his self-preservation. He says, voice hoarse with sleep, “Where are we going?”

“We’ve been funded to find the fabled Dragon’s Cove,” Jensen murmurs in reply. Legend has it that once upon a time dragons lived in an off-shore cove somewhere in the New World. Legend also says that there’s insurmountable wealth hidden away there.

Jared, frankly, doesn’t believe it exists. But he’s not stupid enough to say so. Instead, he says, almost hesitantly, “You know me.”

Jensen’s quill scratches the paper. “And so I do.” The candle glows steady at his side. Jared feels that if he just reached an arm out, he could rest his hand against Jensen’s arm, feel the steady rise and fall of his breath, strangely familiar. The scratching stops. “Don’t you?”

“I–” Steady hands, a sharp mind, a stubborn heartbeat that perseveres through time. “Yeah,” Jared says, mouth dry.

“I thought so,” Jensen says, and that’s that. Jared falls asleep to the sound of Jensen’s steady breathing and writing.

When they finally do pull up at the cove, against all odds after two months, three thunderstorms and several whirlpools and a flurry of Jensen’s furious captaining, it turns out that they find huge arches of dragons’ skeletons after all, and gem and gold hoards that’ll last them all their life in the New World.

* * *

Time eludes Jared and he’s not sure how long he’s been clinging onto the edge without water, without sleep. His tongue lies thick and heavy against his throat and his mind sluggishly continues churning, sends basic signals to keep breathing, keep hanging on.

He senses through the blindfold when the tent flap opens — as it does, every day — and they shove his head back to ask for answers that Jared refuses to give up. Today they’re particularly rough. The war must not be proceeding well, and Jared’s heart gives a little surge for his country and army. Then he wishes his heart was not beating at all.

When he refuses to speak as usual, they pull a hood over his head. Complete, suffocating darkness descends. White noise starts up all around him. He involuntarily jerks from the first blow and the stinging bite of pain, his hands twisting in their binds behind him, breaking open barely-formed scabs.

Time slows, dilates, and drags on until he’s stretched thin and every part of him is screaming. He’s suffocating. Each breath gives him no air and only the fabric of the hood, each cut is careful and peels his skin upwards. His muscles tremble and his heart’s pumping uselessly, letting all his blood flow out his wounds, to waste. Tear tracks streak down the grime of his face, mouth gaping in a rattling gasp. Pain climbs through his veins, barbed, hooks, ripping him up into shreds. They tear away everything and his throat is running hopelessly, without stop, begging. Something in him breaks.

“Jensen,” he hears himself say through the daze, doesn’t know who Jensen is, but he knows that the name means safety and warmth and love no matter where nor when, and it’s a name that he only whispers in his dreams. “Jensen, Jensen, please, Jensen—”

“ _How do you know that name?”_ someone demands brusquely through the haze.

Jared would answer them if he could, but the only litany that falls from his broken lips is the name.

“Jensen what?” they demand, again, again, and hit him, until Jared says, “Ack- Ackles, Jensen, Jensen, please, stop them hurting me.” He can almost feel the surprise rippling around the room.

The pain falls away suddenly, the way land drops away at a cliff, and Jared is left shaking and broken apart, all pieces of him strewn around the room and held together by only tenuous tendons and strings. The hood is jerked away and air rushes in to soothe his buckling lungs. The voices around him are arguing in low, heated tones, but Jared can’t listen anymore.

Unconsciousness comes as a reprieve.

  
  
When he comes to, he opens his eyes not to the blindfold, but to the dark outline of someone squatting in front of him, tipping his head back, running a finger along his scars.

“Jen– Jen– ” Jared’s mouth says from between cracked lips, “Jen– sen...”

“Jared, baby, how could you be here?” the person murmurs in return, sliding another hand up to cup his face as though he is as fragile as a trembling vase. And he _is_ trembling, Jared registers vaguely. His whole body is quaking under the strain of existing. His hands are still bound, he is still on the chair, but the way he is held tells him everything will be fine. Soon.

Jensen shifts, and for a moment the medals on his uniform catch a sliver of light that sneaks in through the gap of the tent-flap. Jared wonders what has become of his own uniform, also littered with medals. Likely tossed away somewhere and burned. Or shown to his people to break their morale.

“General?” a voice comes from outside. “Your lieutenant wants to see you, sir.”

“A minute,” Jensen says, and Jared winces from the loudness of his voice. Immediately Jensen’s hands are back, apologising in hushed tones and small caresses. “You’ve been so brave,” Jensen is whispering. “Never thought I’d find you, my brave, beautiful Jared...”

Vaguely, Jared realises something is wrong. The General of the enemy’s army isn’t called Jensen Ackles. It’s a man called Ether, that cruel bastard. Jensen isn’t– can’t be– They’ve got _spies_ watching Ether and all his communications, for fuck’s sake!

Then Jensen turns, black ink under his collar, and it hits Jared, exactly what this means. The tattoo is one his army’s only ever seen once, and on a spy who’s immediately bitten down on cyanide and died. It’s elaborate and needlessly intricate. It’s a bird’s eye. It’s the covert higher ring in the enemy army that Jared’s people had refused to acknowledge existed.

His army’s been _played_! Immediately Jared’s mind goes back to the battlefield, how his people are marching for the citadels of Galli because so many carefully coded letters from Ether had pointed to a section of their army moving from the west.

Damn it!

His attention is brought back to the earnest green eyes of General Ackles — because Ether isn’t the General at all, fuck! — looking up at him. “I’m so sorry,” Jensen says. “Even if I got you out, we wouldn’t survive.”

Jared would say, “It’s alright,” but he can’t seem to make his mouth move.

“Find me on the other side,” Jensen whispers, and kisses him, feather-soft like the bird eye on his skin. Jared wishes he could kiss him forever.

Outside, soldiers stand on guard, chatting amicably under their breaths. The day is slow. The fleet is moving out in two hours for a final assault on the fortress in the East, and they’ll end this war for once and for all. They’re chuckling about it — going home to their wives and families, when two gunshots explode into the air.

The gunshots came from inside the tent. The guards give a perfunctory glance in, nudging the tent-flap aside, expecting to see General Ackles with a dead man at his feet, two shots in each eye. It’s the man’s favourite way to execute, after all.

But that’s not the sight that greets them this time.

Two shots. One for each heart broken.

The army falls into chaos. The strike on the fortress falls short. The war rages on for another thirty years.

* * *

There’s not much nicer than sitting on your balcony, drinking coffee, and reading the newspaper on a cheerfully sunny day. He’ll miss this when he moves out. The street below is bustling with noise, the marketplace crowded with shouting and the exchange of coins. His mother is running the stall downstairs.

Jared purses his lips. The headline today is about some famous singer and his crew that were injured on-stage in an equipment accident. One of the crew members actually died, he notes with surprise, but the article seems to be mainly concerned with the injuries of the singer. The crew member is unnamed, but something brushes at Jared’s mind like he _should_ know the name.

Strange.

People die all the time, Jared thinks. Somewhere, people’s lives are ending and they’re living out tragedies. And instead, he’s looking at a newspaper and trying to wonder what it was like for this one roadie. But he _should_ know. He _should,_ and he’s not exactly sure why. It’s all very strange. Jared is abruptly aware of his own mortality, the _thud-thud_ of his heart, and feels very much in-the-moment, breathing, still alive, distinctly so, even against the odds of the universe.

Something isn’t right. The world’s tipped a little off-kilter, a bowl of water tilted, stuff splashing out the edges, and when Jared tries to look in, the surface is too disturbed to see anything clearly.

Something is not right. But Jared turns the newspaper page anyway, where some scientist’s describing mutations of the human genome, and even though he doesn’t even get through the next article and goes back downstairs to help his mother sell vegetables, he can’t get the unnamed roadie out of his head for a very long time.

There had been a chance, his mind tells him, even though he doesn’t know what chance it had been at all. There had been a chance. And it had slipped away, out of his hands, dissolved in the wind.


End file.
